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Media Watch
Media and Media awards
Why is it that our media fights shy of reporting awards received by some in the profession for their outstanding contribution to journalism in India? One would think that that would be the most natural thing to do. N Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu has been chosen for this year’s K R Narayanan Award for distinguished service to journalism. One did not notice that item in most of our newspapers. Don’t they consider it as news? The Award was instituted by the K R Narayanan Foundation in memory of the late President. The Award is to honour individuals who have excelled in various fields. Ram certainly hugely merits the Award for holding high the principles of journalism in a consistent and determined way.
At a media conference, the Award Committee chairman Justice R Narayana Kurup, formerly acting Chief Justice of the Madras High Court said Ram was chosen for the Award “for highlighting the problems of the ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka through a series of articles, fostering better relations between India and China and for sensitizing the readers of The Hindu to the hazards of climate change and global warming”.
Interestingly, the late K R Narayanan began his career with a brief stint in journalism when he joined The Hindus as a sub-editor after quitting the job of a college lecturer. That from The Hindu he went on to join the Indian Foreign Service and ended up as President of India is another story. The Hindu is about the only paper in India which continues to maintain its old world charm, resisting the temptation to attract readers through cheapening its contents or by splashing its pages with colour. Some of its reportage is extraordinary and it has on its staff outstanding journalists like P Sainath and Praveen Swami, the former an expert in rural development and the latter known for his investigative reporting. His latest report in The Hindu (November 13) is on David Headley, now generally believed to have had a hand in the terrorist attacks on Mumbai’s major land marks.
Headley was born Dawood Gilani and is a Pakistani, who changed his name when he received American citizenship, and was planning to visit India in 2006. Arriving in Mumbai, he introduced himself to neighbours in Mumbai’s Breach Candy areas as a Jewish-American. As Swami writes, “behind the façade of a legitimate business, and armed with a United States passport that allowed him to easily obtain a multiple-entry, long-term business visa. Headley is suspected to have carried out reconnasaissance for multiple Lashkar operations”. Now the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has caught him. He must be repatriated to India to face a trial.
The Hindu (November 13) carried two stories that show how distributing information has its own shortcomings. One story, datelined Bangalore said that the statement of assets and liabilities of Chief Justice PD Dinakaran and family from 2005 onwards are not available to the Karnataka High Court. A couple of pages later, the same paper revealed in a report datelined New Delhi that Tiruvallur District Collector V Palanikumar, in his report submitted to the Chief Justice of India had appended a detailed list of government lands in the possession of Justice Dinakaran. The list gives the survey number of each piece of land, area-wise and classification-wise. Surely, what is available to the Supreme Court should also be available at the High Court level? Or is it that the Karnataka High Court was reluctant to pass on information to the media? An applicant had sought it under the Right to Information Act but apparently he was told by the court’s Information Officer that assets and liabilities of officer of Public Authority do not come under the definition of ‘Information’ under Section 2 of the Act. What, then is information? Another story that appeared in the paper makes intriguing reading. There is a well-known five-star hotel in Bangalore known as the ITC Windsor Sherarton that attracts rich tourists. It was built on land owned by the Muslim Wakf Board and must be over half a century old. Overnight, as it were, the hotel has been told that if it wants to continue with the lease it will have to stop serving liquor and pork dishes. How on earth a 5-star hotel can stop serving liquor and pork dishes remains a mystery. Can’t a hotel built on land belonging to the Muslim Wakf Board serve liquor without seeming to offend Muslim sentiment? What kind of fundamentalism is this?
A few years ago, the Wakf Board had sought a rental of Rs 35 lakh a months. Fancy charging a rental of one lakh rupees a day! How much, one wonders, is the hotel’s annual earning ! Who on earth will succeed Rajnath Singh as president of the Bharatiya Janata Party? There is a lot of guess work going on, Again The Hindu carried an interesting report from its New Delhi correspondent Neena Vyas. It would seem that Narendra Modi does not figure in the list of likely candidates. It would seem that “central party leaders are acutely aware that they will all be reduced to zeroes” if Modi become president”. The question arises: Is Modi then all that powerful? But, writes Neena, “another factor is that the three-year tenure of the next (BJP) president will end more than a year ahead of the next Lok Sabha battle”. She adds, “some leaders, including Mr Modi, may be planning ahead for the top slot in 2012-13”. Wait and see. Presently the guess work is that the post will next be filled by Nitin Gadkari, BJP’s Maharashtra State president.
Most journalist below the editor’s rank remain unknown to the end to their lives though only those who work at the desk know how solid their contribution is. But practically all of them pass away unrecognised even after death. Can’t newspapers have the decency to at least have a short obit or one of their professionals on their death. The DNA (November 9) carried a brief items on an inside page saying that veteran journalist Pradeep Shinde who specialised in crime coverage passed away on November 8. Shinde started his career as a journalist about three decades ago and earned fame for his investigative reports. He worked among other publications, for The Daily, The Free Press Journal and The Indian Express. Shinde died after a prolonged illness and this journalist sends his condolences to his author wife Anju Makhija, a brother and a sister. Shinde was hardly 58, but who can tell when Death lays its icy hands. Goodbye, Shinde.
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